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Saturday, March 22, 2014

Ghoulish Happenings, chapter 1: Dumpster Munchies

Lives are never straight
lines: there’s no one point we can look to and say, ‘this is
where it all went wrong.’ I’d like to have one of those but
people who know he would probably say my life is fine or has always
been going wrong. Strangers might point to right now, when I find
myself in the middle of a turf war I hadn’t even known about. That
would probably be a lie though, since I only noticed the frenzy of
howls by the time I was at the bottom of the McDonalds dumpster at
the corner of Fourth and Cameron.

I’d been in it for almost
an hour, working my way through nuggets, fish and finally to a dead
pigeon. I probably should have sensed two werewolves having a
growlfest before that point but it was a really good pigeon: four
days dead, marinated by fries and gravy, the bones almost at a
consistency of chocolate. It was the best meal I’d found in four
days and it’s easy to get lost in the taste of good food, up to a
point.

The point, for me, included
scenting both werewolves at either end of the alleyway. Neither had
caught my scent: I’d been in the dumpster long enough to blend into
it, and I tried to be quiet in dumpsters so people didn’t notice me
in them and run screaming. The local police really don’t like me
and I don’t want to give them more reasons not to. So I’d been
eating quietly, lost in food, and the howls jolted me out of it. They
were low howls, the kind that vibrate through bones and flesh rather
than split the air. I had no idea if that was a wolf thing or a
werewolf thing and just kept mouse-still.

I was strong and tough, but
ending up with a pissed or hurt werewolf in the same dumpster as me
would pretty much be like someone tossing a normal person into an
industrial blender set onto ‘aggravated mulch’ or something. I
didn’t even eat the last leg of the pigeon, just kept still as the
werewolves impacted like cars. Growls and snarls and whines cut
through the air as they tore into each other, bones and flesh
shattering and healing between movement. Both were male, one older by
at least twenty years. Maybe. I can tell how old a person is by
sniffing them, but werewolves are monsters as well and heal so fast
that for all I know they might not even age like humans do.

I wasn’t about to look at
check. And definitely not about to ask. They were related: brothers,
parent and kid fighting? No idea. They didn’t talk, just tore into
each other again and again. One was faster, smaller, healed quicker:
the older one, probably, the other was bigger and stronger, not
healing quite as quick but the bone of them was more fluid, the
shifts in healing and changing more controlled. I bit back a whine at
the thought of what their bones would taste like.

I think the fight lasted a
minute. It felt longer, but the younger werewolf broke away first and
fled. He’d expected a faster fight, uncertainty creeping into his
scent. And if I could smell that, the other werewolf definitely
could. I had no idea who’d win the next time they fought, less
desire to ever find out. The older werewolf whined softly to himself
as his wounds healed a final time, bones shattering and remaking
themselves as he took on human form. His clothing must have changed
with him, because I head the ring of a cell phone closer to the
dumpster than I’d have liked.

“It’s me. I won. He
should be home by breakfast.” There was a pause. “I don’t know
who is going to win the next time, love. I’m running low on
tricks.” He sounded tired, and the phone snapped off as the
werewolf walked away.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”